Current_Issue.tar.gz - Administrate Me

As a system administrator, one of my favorite things is to be ignored. No,
it's not due to a latent social anxiety disorder or anything; it's just
because when the sysadmin doesn't hear from anyone, it means things are
working. In fact, if things are going really well, we can forward our
phones and spend the afternoon on a beach somewhere. No one would ever
miss us.

Sadly, that's not usually how things go. Call it job security, call it bad
karma, or just blame Bill Gates—for whatever reason, computers break.
Even when they don't break, they get old and wear out. In fact, for most
of our workdays (and nights), we system administrators spend our lives in
a paranoid state ready for the whole world to fall apart. When that
happens, everyone suddenly remembers the sysadmin and suddenly
is angry with him or her. That's where this issue of Linux
Journal comes into
play. With our system administration issue, we try to fortify your
paranoia with redundancy, calm your nerves with best practices and teach
the fine art of telling the future to determine when a failure is about to
happen. If we do a really good job, you might even learn a few ways to
prevent disaster before it strikes at all.

Mick Bauer ends his series on building a transparent firewall. The
best offense against outside attack is a strong defense, and Mick will make
you paranoid enough to make sure your firewall is top notch. Kyle Rankin
gets into the networking act this month as well and shows how to bond
Ethernet ports together for redundancy or speed. So many servers come with
multiple Ethernet ports, it's a waste not to take advantage of them.

When you have a server with multiple bonded NICs, it certainly makes sense
to add storage to it as well. Greg Bledsoe describes how to use AoE (ATA
over Ethernet) to build your own SAN at a fraction of the cost of buying
one. With hard drives connected directly to your network, it takes out a
single point of failure and also allows a gradual expansion without the
need for buying new chassis.

With Linux acting as a firewall, and Linux acting as a SAN, why not add one
more possibility to the mix? Henry Van Styn not only shows us how to turn
our Linux box into a switch, but also how to use VLANs in that switch.
VLANs are a powerful way to secure network traffic, and with Linux acting
as a switch, it also can use the security of VLANs in addition to its other
abilities.

But, that's just the networking part of this issue. There's lots more to
being a sysadmin than filtering a few packets. Michael J. Hammel shows
how to manage KVM deployments with virt-manager. Hardware virtualization
is a powerful tool, and thanks to virt-manager, those VMs can be configured
with a nice GUI tool from any Linux computer that can access the VM host.

Sometimes it's not just virtual machines that need to be installed,
however, and that's where Clonezilla comes in. Jeramiah Bowling
demonstrates the ins and outs of Clonezilla, a powerful cloning tool that
makes imaging new computers a breeze. When imaging, of course, it's
important that your original image is exactly how you want it. Tony Kay's
article on Linux swap space is something you'll want to read before
creating your master image. We don't usually think much about swap space,
but it's more than just a safety net if you happen to run out of RAM.
And, of course, no system administrator would be caught dead without
backups—lots and lots of backups. Petros Koutoupis explains how to take
snapshots with LVM2, which is a neat way to take zero downtime snapshots of
your Linux system.

We certainly haven't left out our non-sysadmins this month though. If
you've been looking for a viable, open-source replacement for Microsoft
Exchange, SOGo might be just the thing you're looking for. Sure, it takes
some system administration to install it, but once it's going, SOGo is a
tool for the end user. Ludovic Marcotte covers the features of this
powerful groupware alternative. When you add to that our regular cast of
programmers, like Dave Taylor scripting mortgage calculations and Reuven M.
Lerner delving into HTML5, this issue is bound to please. For now, I'm going to take this issue and
head to the beach. Don't worry; I'll forward my phones in case anything
catastrophic happens. Otherwise, I doubt anyone will miss me.

Shawn Powers is the Associate Editor for Linux
Journal. He's also the
Gadget Guy for LinuxJournal.com, and he has an interesting collection
of vintage Garfield coffee mugs. Don't let his silly hairdo fool you,
he's a pretty ordinary guy and can be reached via e-mail at
shawn@linuxjournal.com. Or, swing by the #linuxjournal IRC
channel on Freenode.net.

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